Car manufacturers already give you the same powerful engine that you can't afford/don't want to buy and "shrink" it with SW. If you jailbreak it, you lose the warranty and bye bye insurance.

You should not think that you're paying more for getting less. You should think that finally you can now enable more in your engine if you want to. Until today, you couldn't.

You just had to know that your car is more powerful than the papers say and live with that.

This is about trapping people into paying a subscription forever. That's what is abusive. There's no need to make up other things on top of that. Thankfully, there are a lot of choices in this space.

Is it abusive because it is tied to hardware?

No, I see it as the opposite. I see it as Volkswagen simplifying production by limiting variability and giving you the option to get a less capable product at at a cheaper price.

A 6 and a 8 core processor is probably the same die also and produced at the same cost. Maybe 2 cord were turned off because they were faulty or maybe they were turned off because some people don’t have the need and money for 8 cores. Does it matter? Now they can still buy a computer. Is that a bad thing?

I don't agree with this. Let's say they make 2 engines, one normal one and one powerful one. Customer pay different price points.

Now it turns out that making 2 different engines is actually pretty wasteful, and it's way more efficient to make 1 engine, and limit the possibilities for the lower price point (this is already happening).

Now you come along and say "Illegal!". Now they have to sell this engine at the same price, which doesn't make sense in the market. So they are back to the inefficient way of producing 2 different engines for 2 different markets.

Calling this "wasteful" is weird in my eyes.

I'm not in the automotive industry, so I don't know all the details, and I might be wrong on the above reasoning, but this is what I got from it.

1 engine production line, serving 2 different price points.

Example: Ford.

In many cases they ship 1 engine type and restrict it by software. This way they reduce manufacturing costs, I understand, it's just unfair that you have the same engine of someone with officially more horsepower and all you can do is cheat (with software that enables the feature) and hence say goodbye to your insurance.

That has more to do with their legacy ICE business than with their EVs. Their EV business is apparently growing quite nicely. And they have issues with tariffs in the US of course. But so do all their competitors.

> Consumers don't have to "subscribe" to this sort of gamesmanship.

But some happily do. Modern cars have a lot of software that defines their behavior and characteristics. Getting access to some of the feature flags is a natural control point. There's no need to introduce a lot of variation at the hardware level.

In the end you get what you pay for. If you can get a better deal for the same money, you should take it of course. Nobody stops you. Or if on the other hand horsepower doesn't really matter to you and you would mostly drive the car in economy mode, you might pay a bit less for a decent car. EVs offer a ridiculous amount of horsepower and torque. Limiting that a bit via software isn't that strange and actually necessary to prevent them from shredding their own tires. Conservative settings are better for the tires and limit the amount of wear and tear (and resulting warranty and insurance claims).

VW actually uses the same base platform for a lot of different cars and sub brands. At the hardware level there is far less difference than the amount of models would suggest. Any differences in driving experience are mostly software. And the cool thing with software is that you can change things. So, why not try to charge for that?

I personally wouldn't care about paying a subscription for stuff like this. But I appreciate some people might care enough to hand over some cash that don't necessarily have a lot of cash on hand to outright buy a more expensive model. And technically any car that has the option, is unmonetized potential. So, a subscription isn't the weirdest thing to tap into that potential. Many people lease their car anyway. So, they are already paying per month. Pay a little extra for some redundant fun on the daily commute. Or don't and pay a little less.

I don't think that's consumer hostile. Of course the FOMO for pointless features that this creates causes some people to get irrationally angry about the perceived injustice of somebody not giving them something on the cheap.

Passenger airline carriers and printer manufacturers have a similar model of using their flagship products (flights and printers) as loss leaders for their actual products (credit cards and ink).

Now I trust them even less, if that's even possible .

And someone at VW looked at this and said: amazing idea.

My single take from this is that batteries have become so cheap that you can put more in a car and still make a good profit.

It would have been nice if the savings would be passed on to the consumer.

It might not happen this year, it might not happen this decade, but it will eventually happen.

Organizing your business in such an anti-consumer way is a huge liability, but executives who will have extracted all the wealth anyways will probably be long gone by then.

Or enabling full power puts more load on the vehicle's components and costs the manufacture more in warrant and reduced resale values.

Suspect it is a bit of both, but without access to the books.

Note that here, subscription is just an option, you can also buy the permanent upgrade.

Still something distasteful about it but not quite as vampiric

The company ended up folding either way.

Of course, if you have a car 2.0+cc and 150HPs why would you care. But the opposite can be useful.

EDIT: I am keenly aware how cars work and don’t need eSplaining on them. I articulate my point better in a comment deeper in the thread. Apologies for my snark and vitriol over unnecessary and exploitative subscriptions coming off as somehow condoning VW-formulated petrol or Tesla-approved electricity.

I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that a company founded by Adolf Hitler behaves in this way.

They're going to do the same thing in Europe (where the US tariffs don't apply).

Subscription-based features that are already built into the car and only activated by software have been talked about since at least 2020.

Car companies have been leaning on (BS, IMO) software revenue since the days of the $100+ GPS data update sticks, at the latest.

I don't think this is the future any consumer wants, but it's the one we're gonna get from every industry where money can be turned on with the flip of a Boolean.

This is how pharma works: pharma entities in the US dont make any profit, because they send royalty to the IP holder entity in Switzerland, where these royalty payments are taxes at the lowest rate possible and profits are sheltered that way from the US and EU taxation

https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/deadly-prices-pharma...

This might come close: https://www.slate.auto/en

Example: Acceleration Boost is a 2k one-time upgrade. Once you purchase it, you get it forever. EAP and FSD are the same: pay once, get for life. Those who purchased FSD before HW3 also got/get included driving computer upgrade. Of course this was done from Tesla to avoid backslash, but at the same time it was done without back-and-forth: they understood the situation and simply rolled it out.

FSD subscription makes sense because you purchase more "features", maybe for a limited time, for a much lower price.

If your daily driving is 20mi, you probably are fine with AP, and won't justify spending 4k on EAP, 8k on FSD or 100$/mo on the FSD subscription. But maybe if you trip for holidays for a few weeks, you can purchase the subscription for a couple months.

If you're daily driving 50+mi, or drive in very busy cities, I can see the 8k purchase offering some value if you want to keep the car more than 6 years (8k/100$ - 80 months, ~6.5y), and you can still try it out via subscription beforehand and decide to not pay the full price upfront.

Basically Tesla's model is mostly one-time license fee, except for FSD subscription to ease the access to software-powered features.

What VW is doing is selling you hardware, and then asking you to pay every month if you want to unlock its full potential. Honestly this should be illegal, a one-time fee should be the only way allowed. And I recognize they have the option of a one-time fee, but of course they're banking on people opting for the low-cost option and forget they have it active. EDIT: this is also the test bed for more subscription stuff, they want to see how people react to it. If there's no big backslash, expect more subscriptions to come.

At least Tesla was using some sense of the "ship one battery and restrict it in software" for an actual tangible hardware good versus some software shenanigans in the VW camp (again).

The analogy to software is great though; nobody paying for software owns it, or even has the option to own it. This is not fully the case for physical things, and people are rightly angry about “owning” things without owning them.

It's as though, and now I know this sounds crazy, as though some bean-counter with a spreadsheet was actually the one determining price and features and not a team of engineers saying, "Here's what we can deliver competitively."

And while to a younger crowd, that might sound obvious, I would like to suggest that the older U.S. model (and now we're going back to the early days of the wireless, perhaps up to early Hewlett Packard times) was to beat your competition on price and features. You would never nerf a thing in your product line up.

Am I wildly off base here, naive, or have an ignorant reading of the history of U.S. Capitalism? I'm merely a layman so am happy to hear from someone who has studied this stuff.

A bit of a tangent, but I'm also reminded of the era when HeathKit was an option. My dad recalls at least that the HeathKit kits were not always inexpensive — but the completed consumer electronic project would be of very high quality. I know he but some of his early "hi-fi" equipment from HeathKit kits.

A recent headline decelared that China is run by engineers, the U.S. by lawyers. Perhaps it should have said the West is run by marketing.

I saw that current VW models feature very prominent (and IMO ugly, unibrow style) LED strips.

Does the car light up in a different color if you pay for the subscription?

It makes even more sense in EVs where you don’t have to be concerned with the performance of supporting components to the engine.

The difference here, is that it’s a subscription, not a one time upgrade, and as a result, not an upgrade you can sell on.

same with cars, same parts with one SKU, but various features turned on/off allows car OEMs to make different price offerings at different prices to capture larger part of the demand curve

I might at some point buy a second hand one. And VW has a lot of pretty decent EVs in the market that are trickling down to the second hand market at increasingly more attractive prices. Probably not my dream second hand car (I think they are kind of ugly) but they aren't horrible vehicles. I don't think I'll ever want to hand over cash to the oil industry voluntarily. I have driven rental petrol and diesel cars in the past. But it just feels a bit stupid to fill up a car for 50+ euros. A few years worth of money saved on not buying fuel easily adds up to a pretty nice budget for a modest second hand EV these days.

Maybe an analogy is thus: I find often sports kit that is black or otherwise drab coloured is cheaper. I find this annoying, as I like my kit to be colorful - and I feel like I'm being made to pay extra for color pigment, which surely cost at most pennies more per item. On the flip side, if I go for the black item, it's kind of subsidised by the color-buyers (the comparator is one where black and colorful items cost the same average amount).

The fact that the hardware here is identical but software isn't is IMO an implementation detail.

We should be concerned of the increased possibility of malicious third-party hacking of other people's property.

And, I should not hack into my desk to open my drawers.

I haven't seen an analysis of whether regulations preclude those controls being open source and giving the car owner full access. Of course the owner could make the car noncompliant in that case, but the owner can do that on current and past cars using a wrench.

Keep your anti-EV hatred in check for a second and note that nothing in here is EV only. They could just as well do this with a gasoline car, that engine is also electronically controlled.

This is generally valid for current societies, not just specifically.

Conformism has infiltrated economics, so now the supply-demand mechanism is broken: the demand agents are not "informed and rational", as classical theory wanted, so the supply is degraded - spawning "shrinkflation" and "viliflation".

Regrettably, despite of all the brouhaha with the heated seats, all this b/s never really went away.

Minding one's own business is an underrated virtue.